Headless CMS, Decoupled CMS and Content as a Service (CaaS)

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As importance of CMS is increasing when we are talking about RESTful API, Microservices and also using CMS in Application Development. Headless CMS, Decoupled CMS & Content as a Service (CaaS) are newer things and we guess this is a timely article for our readers. Many of these terminologies are quite ill-defined and commonly for practical purposes, for some use cases.

Headless CMS, Decoupled CMS and Content as a Service (CaaS)

WordPress is example of traditional monolithic CMS where theme actually drives the frontend. That theme is a barrier in development as that is no way flexible but good for some specific purposes only. These CMS gives us a way to store data on MySQL like database, a CRUD UI and obviously ways to display the fetched data.

Decoupled CMS architecture is headless. Here, way to store data on MySQL like database, a CRUD UI is constant but
it is API that is directly related to fetching the data. So the content for the site is accessible via a web-service API, in a RESTful manner.

Obviously WordPress has REST API that that brings that decoupled CMS architecture. But we are talking about those CMS which are Headless CMS, Decoupled CMS etc by default. A headless CMS stores and delivers content. Thats it. Exactly like a light web application with private backend. What will be at frontend that not determined by Headless CMS or Decoupled CMS.

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So, at the end, we can develop a mobile application and/or a static website as frontend via API. Main advantages of Headless CMS/Decoupled CMS are :

Decoupled CMS is slightly different as micro services are taken in to account. So Decoupled CMS is more advanced. Content as a service is the name for a new type of CMS. A CaaS hosts the content repository in the cloud
from where the content can be fetched via a RESTful API in a well-structured format, such as JSON.